“Your Inner Fish” premiere screening with discussion

April 3, 2014 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

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Chicago’s own paleobiologist, Neil Shubin, will be the host of a scientific series based on his best-selling book, Your Inner Fish. This special premiere screening will be followed by a discussion with Dr. Shubin and the Field Museum’s distinguished service curator Lance Grande.

Have you ever wondered why the human body looks the way it does? Why our hands have five fingers instead of six? Why we walk on two legs instead of four? It took more than 350 million years for the human body to take shape. How did it become the complicated, quirky, amazing machine it is today?

Your Inner Fish delves deep into the past to answer these questions. That’s because the evolution of humans can be traced into the distant past, to the earliest forms of vertebrate life on land and even to the earliest forms of life on Earth. Each of us carries the genetic imprint of creatures that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. From them, we inherited our most remarkable features — as well as quirks like bad backs and hernias.

Premiering Wednesday, April 9, 2014, the three-part series reveals a startling truth: Hidden within the human body is a story of life on Earth. The show will air on local PBS stations on Wednesdays, April 9, 16 and 23. Details for WTTW in Chicago are here.